The Innocent (43 page)

Maybe he should stop and put her up behind him on his sturdy gelding so she wouldn’t look like such a useful prospect for kidnap and ransom. It was then he heard hoofbeats behind them on the road.

Turning, he saw a small group of horsemen heading toward them, covering the ground at an efficient hard gallop that ate up the space between the two parties. The light was uncertain so it was hard to see how they were dressed, but he caught the glint of a sword and his heart sank.

“Ladies, ride—now! Follow the road, it’s not far to the convent. Go!” And he turned his horse to block the track as well as he could. Deborah, who had also heard the horsemen, thumped her feet into Lizotte’s startled flanks and whacked the palfrey on the rump, hard, as she caught up with Anne.

“Fast as you can follow!” And the two animals sprang to a gallop, sensing the fear in their riders. The trees closed them in as they ran and the gloom increased, but then ahead, around a bend, they saw a faint glimmer in the distance: it was a light, a light burning in a building. Behind, though, they heard hooves and then there were voices calling Anne by name, yelling at them to stop.

How did they know to call her name? It terrified both women so that they put their heads down and urged their mounts on, though their horses could never outrun a destrier at full stretch.

Nearer and nearer to the lights they rode. They could see a cluster of buildings now. The village! But the men were at their heels and the thunder of hooves on the frozen road grew closer and closer. All too soon, as they burst out of the forest. Anne was overtaken by a large man on an even larger horse, but as he reached out to haul on the palfrey’s bridle, screaming at her to stop, she managed to hit him full in the face as he bent down. He reeled back to recover and fell from his horse, which, panicked, cannoned into another of the riders—and he, too, fell.

“Ride!” screamed Deborah. “The convent!”

And with a fleeting glance back, in which she saw that her companion was close behind, two other men bearing down on her, Anne did what she was told, urging the terrified little horse even faster toward the looming gates of a large building up ahead.

And then she saw that the nuns were pulling the gates closed!

“No!” screamed Anne. “Wait! God’s bones, wait!” Blessed be. One of the women who’d been closing the gate heard her and had the presence of mind to yell at her sister to pull the gate open again.

Anne and Deborah raced through, and there was just time for the gates to be hauled shut in the teeth of their pursuers with a resounding thud as the great iron bar that locked them down was dropped into its place.

The two women fell onto their animals’ necks, flecked with mud and breathing like fire bellows as nuns clustered around them, some holding flaring torches, exclaiming loudly.

“Well, and what is this?” It was a cool voice, elegant, slightly nasal, and very controlled.

Anne breathed deeply and sat up first. She recognized that tone: authority. “We crave indulgence, Reverend Mother…”

“It is not mine to give and that is not my title. I am the subprioress. Well?”

“Pardon, sister, but we had no choice but to arrive as we did. We were attacked.” It was Deborah who had spoken, and while she was still short of breath, her composure had returned.

“By whom were you attacked?”

“We do not know. Only that we were riding through the forest, with our escort, and a party of men attempted to waylay our journey. They must still be outside.”

The nuns were hanging on every word; nothing so exciting had happened since the infirmaress had run away with a passing friar three years ago. Just then a great banging set up; someone was thumping loudly at the gate and ringing the porteress’s bell at the same time with a determined jangle.

All eyes turned to the subprioress. “Well, Sister Michael, don’t just stand there, see who knocks. Go on.” Sister Michael was a strong girl, a peasant lay sister who’d been given to the convent when her family could no longer afford to keep her. She was one of the two whose job it was to guard the gate during the day and lock the convent at night. With a gulp, Sister Michael strode over to the shuttered hole in the wall through which the sisters generally spoke to the outside world. The banging on the gate had stopped but the portal bell was still ringing vigorously.

“Who is there?” asked Sister Michael, in as stern and intimidating a voice as she could muster.

“An emissary to speak to the girl Anne, lately in the service of the queen.”

More sensation among the nuns. The queen’s servant? Which one was she? Sister Michael looked back imploringly at the subprioress—what should she say now?

“Tell us who you are.” It was the subprioress who spoke.

“I and my party are servants of Sir Mathew Cuttifer. We have come to escort Mistress Anne to Blessing House in London. I have warrants you may read.”

Anne could not help herself, the laughter burst out of her like a shower of sparks. Sir Mathew had kept his word—and she’d nearly killed not one but two of his men. A fine beginning to their new relationship.

“Let us see this warrant. You may pass it through.”

The sisters parted respectfully to allow the subprioress to join Sister Michael at the gate with Anne and Deborah as a rolled parchment was passed through the hole, the shutters being eased open just a little.

As Anne quickly saw, Sir Mathew’s seal was on the unbroken wax, and as the scroll was unfurled, she glimpsed his careful signature at the bottom: “Sir Mathew Cuttifer, Bart.” It was from him, they were safe.

Deborah embraced Anne happily, and then looked a little guiltily at the subprioress. “May we speak with these men, sister?”

The subprioress nodded reluctantly. “Very well, you may speak through the wall, but if you seek lodging this night, your conversation should be brief and can be resumed tomorrow.” Turning to the waiting nuns, she clapped her hands. “Come now, sisters, enough of this nonsense.”

And as she moved away, gliding into darkness with the other nuns, Anne crossed herself and breathed in the freezing air as if it had been a great draft of wine. She had friends! Sir Mathew believed her story.

Quietly, she gathered herself and stepped over to the wall with Deborah. Calm confidence clothed Anne like a cloak as the tension breathed out of her body. But there was still an appealing glimmer of vulnerability under the careful, polite words she spoke to Mathew’s men, and that was enough to win the day, even with the man whose face she had bruised with a small determined fist.

That night, both women prayed together beside their cots in the clean, spartan little guest cell that they shared, though Anne held fast to Deborah’s hand as, later, she slipped into sleep. And dreamt of her mother: a girl younger than she, who walked, smiling, in a flower-studded meadow and opened her arms to offer love—and call her back home.

Chapter Thirty-one

London was mostly still asleep as Anne’s party waited outside the city walls for the gates to open. It was barely light, and while they could hear some stirring of feet on the streets inside the city, it was too early for the vendors of food or small beer to be about.

Anne and Deborah were stiff and dirty, for it had been a cold homecoming along increasingly churned-up roads from which the horses of the men in front and around them had thrown up mud, some of which, inevitably, they carried.

At last, the great iron portcullis was raised, and the gate wardens pulled open the huge gates to the city of London. The impatient crowd that was now milling all around them surged inside. They were lucky that John Slaughter carried the king’s badge, for that, coupled with the loud voices and brandished swords of Mathew Cuttifer’s men, got them through near the head of the river of humanity. But then they found themselves crammed tight into the narrow, filthy street behind the gate.

Trying to force their way through the people into the city reminded Anne of the first time she’d crossed London Bridge. Now she and Deborah were like the folk who’d pushed them to one side; and she, too, was dressed in fine clothes, much finer than the people all around them. All was never as it first seemed.

The familiar smell of the great city swaddled them too—smoke, decay, and shit in equal parts—as they pressed their way forward in single file under the overhanging buildings, trying to avoid their animals’

stepping in the stinking open channel that ran down the center of the street, clogged with filth. At last they were in King Street, and turning down toward the river, they saw Blessing House.

Anne was surprised to find tears in her eyes. Was it really only six months or so since this grim building had been her home? Now she was coming back not as a serving girl but as someone much more enigmatic. And dangerous?

Outside the house at last, she slipped gratefully to the ground, patted Minette’s sweat-dampened neck, and whispered in one twitching gray ear, “You don’t have to carry me anymore—but thank you. May we meet again.” Then, embarrassed that she had nothing to give John Slaughter for all his care of them, she stepped forward and held up her hand for the kind-faced man to grasp.

“John, you have been so good to us. I shall make sure Sir Mathew, and Sergeant Cage, both hear of your service. Go with God.” The man touched his flat leather bonnet and smiled happily, his one tooth yellow in the red cavern of his mouth.

“A great and rare pleasure, ladies. Especially since I’ll carry the memory of you whacking that great lump off his horse until my dying day.” His great gust of laughter cheered Anne and Deborah, though they tried, for politeness’ sake, to suppress their own giggles.

The “great lump”—Sir Mathew’s trusted lieutenant—scowled as he escorted the women around to the rear door of Blessing House. He’d been instructed to bring the women to Mathew as discreetly as possible and paid extra silver pennies for his and his men’s continuing silence, so he swallowed his ire.

Since it was early, and the household at Mass, it was an easy matter for him to escort Anne and Deborah through the kitchen and up to the solar with its familiar applewood fire where Margaret was waiting. After a tearful welcome, the women sat for a moment in silence as the warmth from the fire found its way into Anne’s and Deborah’s bones.

“Water will be brought for you both to wash off the grime of the journey, and when you are ready, there are clean clothes. Sir Mathew will join us after Mass.” Anne felt odd hearing Margaret discuss her needs as if this lady were the servant, but her thoughts were interrupted by a faint knock at the door that led down to the kitchen.

Lady Margaret gestured for the two women to conceal themselves in the garderobe as, a moment later, a timid-faced girl holding two large leather pails of hot water edged around the door. “You may leave the water by the fire, Yseul.” Without a word, the child scuttled over to the hearth, slopping a little of the water in her eagerness to please. When she had gone, Margaret smiled ruefully as she let Anne and Deborah back into the solar. “Sometimes, Anne, I could wish you were back here with us.”

Anne smiled warmly. “But I am, Lady Margaret. Back to serve you, if that is what you wish.”

The older woman looked at them both and smiled gently. “I do not think that very likely, if what I have been told is true?” She looked directly from Anne to Deborah, though the words came out lightly enough.

Anne smothered the desire to laugh; it was said with such deceptive, gentle courtesy, as if it had been the most innocent inquiry in the world.

“Mistress Deborah, would it please you to wash?” As Anne smilingly picked up the water pails, Lady Margaret conducted her older guest as ceremoniously to the garderobe as if they were at some great court reception, bowing her through the door. “There is a clean wool kirtle and undershift hanging on a peg. We can take your travel clothes to the kitchen to be cleaned and brushed later.”

While Deborah was washing, Anne returned to the fire, grateful for the feeling of warm well-being stealing over her weary body. She looked longingly at the bed for a moment. Last night’s sleep had been scant and poor, and both she and Deborah had flea bites from the common dormitory of the convent they’d stayed at outside the city walls, the same one they’d slept in the night before Anne had joined the Cuttifer household. Anne yawned sleepily as Lady Margaret returned.

“I’ve had beds made up; sleep will be good for both of you.” Lady Margaret strolled over to the fire to join her erstwhile servant.

“And so, Anne, is it true, your…descent?”

Anne looked into the burning coals and a quiet moment passed before she raised her eyes to Lady Margaret’s. “Perhaps. There is proof, I have seen some of it. Deborah has some tokens and Jehanne, my mistress at court, does also.”

Margaret sighed and sat gently in her graceful, gilded Italian chair, arranging the folds of her simple, elegant housegown around her. “Of course, these are dangerous times…again.”

Both women were silent. Anne, growing up in the forest, had not been touched by the late wars between Edward’s father, the Duke of York, and the Lancastrians, nor the later fighting that had culminated in the battle at Towton and Edward taking the throne. But she’d seen the devastation of the countryside and the villages when she and Deborah had ventured out from their home from time to time.

“Yes, it is so,” Anne said finally. “But madam, this was not of my choosing.”

Lady Margaret laughed mirthlessly. “Indeed. How can anyone choose their birth?”

Deborah rejoined them, neat and clean in a plain dark blue woolen dress. “There, that looks well indeed,” Margaret said. “Anne, your turn.”

Anne was itching to shed her filthy clothes and wash the dirt of the journey away, so she needed no further prompting to hurry to the garderobe. If only she could wash her hair as well, but it would take more than an hour or two to dry it by the fire and she needed to speak to Sir Mathew soon, for there was much to discuss.

Anne stripped off her traveling dress and stood shivering in her shift as she washed as quickly as possible. Her face and neck and her hands finally felt clean after vigorous scrubbing with a coarse cloth, and even though the air was frigid in the small smelly anteroom to the cloaca, she stripped off her shift at last and splashed the warm water over her naked body, between her legs, and under her arms. Luckily enough, she was not one of those girls much troubled by sweat, but a long winter journey on filthy roads will make the sweetest body smell rank, and she had learned to be fastidious—both with Deborah and from her time with Lady Margaret.